Allergan recalls textured breast implants due to cancer link

Photo Credit: BROKER, via Alamy, as originally reported by The New York Times on 7/24/19.

Photo Credit: BROKER, via Alamy, as originally reported by The New York Times on 7/24/19.

Global pharmaceutical company Allergan has announced a voluntary worldwide recall of Biocell textured breast implants and tissue expanders due to links to an unusual form of cancer. 

The July 24 recall, made in the United States at the request of the federal Food and Drug Administration, affects implants used for cosmetic breast enlargement and for reconstruction after mastectomy for breast cancer, The New York Times reported.

“Worldwide, 573 cases and 33 deaths from the cancer have been reported, with 481 of the cases clearly attributed to Allergan Biocell implants, the F.D.A. said. Of the 33 deaths, the agency said its data showed that the type of implant was known in 13 cases, and in 12 of those cases the maker was Allergan,” The New York Times reported.

In Europe, the Allergan devices were banned late last year.

Shareholders sued Allergan late last year, as a proposed class action lawsuit in Manhattan federal court accused the company of hiding from investors the link between its textured breast implants and the rare form of cancer, Reuters reported.

The December 2018 lawsuit followed an announcement by Allergan that it would take its textured breast implants off the market in Europe after a Dec. 18 recall order, Reuters reported.

Today, lawyers are advertising for plaintiffs. 

Equifax to pay up to $650 million in data breach settlement

Photo credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images file published in a report by NBC news on 7/22/19.

Photo credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images file published in a report by NBC news on 7/22/19.

“This company’s ineptitude, negligence, and lax security standards endangered the identities of half the U.S. population,” said the New York Attorney General in a statement reported by NBC news.

Reuters reports, “The largest-ever settlement for a data breach draws to close multiple probes into Equifax by the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Board, and nearly all state attorneys general. It also resolves pending class-action lawsuits against the company. Credit-reporting company Equifax will pay up to a record $650 million to settle federal and state probes into a massive 2017 data breach of personal information…”

Equifax is one of the three largest major credit-reporting companies; the company collects and aggregates information on over 800 million individual consumers and more than 88 million businesses worldwide. In 2017, the company made headlines when it disclosed that a data breach had compromised the personal information, including Social Security numbers, of 143 million Americans.

Court rebukes President Trump for blocking followers on Twitter

Photo Credit: Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times as reported in The New York Times on 7/9/19.

Photo Credit: Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times as reported in The New York Times on 7/9/19.

How the First Amendment functions in the social media age gained further clarity this week when a federal appeals court ruled that President Trump violated the Constitution by blocking people from following his Twitter account.

“Because Mr. Trump uses Twitter to conduct government business, he cannot exclude some Americans from reading his posts — and engaging in conversations in the replies to them — because he does not like their views, a three-judge panel on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled unanimously,” The New York Times reports.

Tuesday’s ruling may be appealed.

“Mr. Trump’s legal team argued, among other things, that he operated the account merely in a personal capacity, and so had the right to block whomever he wanted for any reason — including because users annoyed him by criticizing or mocking him,” The New York Times reports.

“Courts have increasingly been grappling with how to apply the First Amendment, written in the 18th century, to the social-media era,” The Times continues. “In 2017, for example, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down a North Carolina law that had made it a crime for registered sex offenders to use websites like Facebook.”

Another judge rebuked for treatment of sexual assault case

Excerpt from the judge's statement as reported by the New York Times, 7/2/19.

Excerpt from the judge’s statement as reported by the New York Times, 7/2/19.

Judicial treatment of sexual assault cases continues to prompt scrutiny, the latest involving a New Jersey family court judge who argued that prosecutors should have considered the suspect’s college prospects and how charges would affect his life.

The New York Times reports on an appeals court’s rebuke of Monmouth County Judge James Troiano of Superior Court, who denied prosecutors’ motion to try a 16-year-old sexual assault suspect as an adult.

The judge questioned whether the incident was rape, although investigators said the boy shared a cellphone video among friends and sent a text that said, “When your first time having sex was rape.”

“The boy filmed himself penetrating her from behind, her torso exposed, her head hanging down, prosecutors said,” The New York Times reported.

The judge said “the young man came from a good family, attended an excellent school, had terrific grades and was an Eagle Scout,” according to the article.

The appeals court “cleared the way for the case to be moved from family court to a grand jury, where the teenager, identified only as G.M.C. in court documents, will be treated as an adult,” the article explained.

“In recent years, judges across the country have come under fire for the way they have handled sexual abuse cases,” The New York Times reported. “One of the most notorious was in 2016 when a judge in California sentenced a Stanford University student to six months in jail after he was found guilty of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman. After an intense public backlash, California voters recalled the judge. Judge Troiano, who is roughly 70, was one of two family court judges whom appeals courts in New Jersey have criticized in recent weeks over relatively similar issues.”

Alabama case stirs debate about the rights of fetuses over those of mothers

Marshae Jones was charged with manslaughter when she was shot and her fetus died. Photo Credit: Jefferson County Jail as reported by The New York Times.

Marshae Jones was charged with manslaughter when she was shot and her fetus died. Photo Credit: Jefferson County Jail as reported by The New York Times.

According to the New York Times, “Marshae Jones was five months pregnant when she was shot in the stomach. Her fetus did not survive the shooting… But on Wednesday, it was Ms. Jones who was charged in the death.”

“The police have said she was culpable because she started the fight that led to the shooting and failed to remove herself from harm’s way,” explains the report.

Since Jones was arrested and charged with manslaughter in Alabama last month, there has been “heated debate over the rights of pregnant women and fetuses nationwide, and Alabama is ground zero for the issue.”  

From another New York Times report: “Activists have also cited it as a demonstration of the dangers of the “personhood” movement, which pushes for the rights of fetuses to be recognized as equal to — or even more important than — the rights of the mothers who carry them. And many are now watching as the movement gains momentum in Alabama, which already has some of the most restrictive reproductive rights laws in the country.”

The Times explains that last November, Alabama voters approved a ballot measure that amended the state’s constitution to recognize the “sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children.” This has resulted in a number of court cases aimed to protect the rights of unborn children, including a wrongful-death lawsuit by a 19-year-old man against a clinic and a pharmaceutical company that provided an abortion pill to his girlfriend.

“Under Alabama law, life begins at conception,” said Bryan Fair, professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Alabama School of Law as reported in The New York Times. “The question is whether that is consistent with federal constitutional law.”